Irregular Warfare Observations from Southern Thailand

How Not To Do COIN

The ongoing Malay-Muslim secessionist insurgency in Southern Thailand represents a cogent challenge to the legitimacy of the Thai state in the southern provinces of Yala, Narathiwat and Pattani, and adjoining districts of neighbouring Songkhla. Since re-igniting in the early 2000s, this conflict is far from abating. As the insurgency reaches its 17th year, Thai authorities are no closer to a solution than they were in the early stages of the conflict, with violence continuing at a slow boil.[i] Responsible for nearly 7,000 deaths[ii], the Southern Thai conflict is one of the most serious, and most deadly, contemporary insurgencies in South-East Asia,[iii] providing some important reinforcement to observations of eminent irregular warfare theorists, and salient lessons for modern security forces and policymakers in what not to do.

As articulated in the 2020 Defence Strategic Update, Australia’s strategic environment will continue to be shaped by great power competition between the United States and China, particularly regarding influence throughout Asia. As a small to middle Indo-Pacific power, Australia has great strategic interest in the stability of ASEAN, and its individual member states, as a collective security community reinforcing a rules-based global order. While ASEAN has a strict non-interference policy in the internal matters of its individual members, the proximity of Thailand’s southern insurgency to Malaysia’s borders, and the government’s perpetual inability to provide stability in the southern provinces is cause for concern. Despite nearly two decades of dedicated counter-insurgency (COIN) efforts by the Thai state, any cessation of violence remains a distant possibility.

Using the Southern Thailand insurgency as a case study, this essay aims to review the historical, social and economic aspects of the Southern Thai provinces which have likely contributed to the commencement and sustainment of political violence; and explore the military and political responses to the violence to date, attempting to identify why they have been ineffective. Specifically, the Thai government’s failure to recognise the relative deprivation of the Malay identity group as a causal factor for the violence has led to inappropriate focus on an enemy-centric approach, rather than addressing population-centric issues. Such an inappropriate strategy provided a spark to the tinderbox of Malay discontent, resulting in waves of violence that have spanned decades.  Significantly, acute spikes in violence were observed to coincide with the 2019 Thai general elections and ASEAN security summit held in Bangkok that same year.[iv] The temporal link to high-profile political events is no coincidence, a stark reminder that the southern violence is political in nature and that policy-based solutions will be far more effective than military ones.

Thus, the Southern Thai insurgency provides a useful case study to reinforce Maher’s observations provided earlier in this collection. Relative Deprivation, Competitive Control, and identity group narratives are strong contributors to this long-lasting period of political violence. However, when examining the political precursors to this violence however, it is important to note that contributing conditions have been in place for centuries, with violence breaking out several times. The focus of this essay will be on the most recent, and most significant, phase of violence in the Malay-Muslim secessionist struggle, but cannot neglect consideration of the long history of socio-political conditions which have fed the fire.

Historical precursors

Patani Malays have suffered marginalisation by the broader Buddhist Thai state[v] since the Siamese conquest of the Sultanate of Patani in the 18th century. The Malay Sultanate of Patani had been a proud centre of Islam in South-East Asia[vi] since its court converted from Buddhism in 1457.[vii] As part of the Thai Chakri Dynasty’s 18th century expansion over the Malay Peninsula, the Sultanate of Patani was conquered in 1789,[viii] and a loose tributary system[ix] was imposed over Patani territory. Thai assimilation attempts commenced almost immediately, but it was not until 1816 that real attempts to decrease local autonomy began.[x] Large-scale revolts were recorded in 1832 when the region was divided into seven provinces to facilitate tax collection, and again in 1902, which led to the arrest of the Raja of Patani.[xi] Thai and British competition in the 19th century for control over the Malay Peninsula ultimately resulted in the 1909 Anglo-Thai treaty, which saw the formal delineation of a border between Malaysia and modern-day Thailand, with no recognition of the former proud Islamic state of Patani. Adding insult to injury, the ratified international border split the former sultanate apart, with the three northern provinces being formally absorbed into the modern Thai state.[xii] The lack of consideration of Patani Malay interests in the Anglo-Thai treaty may have elicited serious questions about the legitimacy of the agreement in the eyes of the governed.

The pace of assimilation increased into the 1930s[xiii] in line with a growing tide of Thai nationalism. Islamic laws were abolished, and all Thai citizens, regardless of ethnicity, were forced to adopt common Thai customs.[xiv] In following years, a number of Muslim opposition movements emerged, calling for self-rule, language and cultural rights, and a return of sharia law, and revolts became commonplace.[xv]

Between 1960 and 1998, a variety of militant separatist movements operated against the Thai authorities in the southern provinces, which existed as ‘zones of dissonance’ to Bangkok’s rule.[xvi] While these groups grew capable enough to represent a threat to the security of the South, their left-wing, socialist platforms did not appeal to the largely conservative population, and they never managed to attain sufficient mass to truly challenge Thai authorities in Bangkok.[xvii] The groups were also plagued by factional infighting and disagreement regarding pursuit of both violent and non-violent strategies.[xviii] Despite the public cadres of the movements enjoying safe haven in Northern Malaysia from which to plan and launch attacks, improved border security cooperation between Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok agreed in 1998,[xix] approving joint cross-border police raids,[xx] facilitated the apprehension of a large number of insurgent leaders. The decapitation strategy proved decisive;[xxi] movements suffered mass membership exodus, with many fighters taking advantage of a government amnesty program.

Following the success of Thailand’s enemy-centric COIN operations, and the near complete collapse of the 1990s opposition movements, a half-hearted attempt by the Thai government to address some of the social issues in the South resulted in a significant ebb in violence, and a relatively peaceful intervening period lasted into the early 2000s. During this period, the Thai government made statements and promises which suggested awareness of the underlying socio-political causes of the unrest, but failed to follow through with meaningful mitigation measures. A key factor in undermining this peace was the decision in 2001 by the newly elected Thaksin government to dismantle the Southern Border Provincial Administrative Committee, the only effectual interagency organisation for administration and security in the South, and to transfer internal security responsibilities to the police. This one policy decision severely eroded the local population’s trust, (as the police were far more heavy-handed), hampered operational effectiveness and removed an organisation with a proven record of dispute resolution, once again leaving a void for militant opposition.[xxii] While Thai colonialism and forced assimilation had resulted in rebellion numerous times[xxiii] in the preceding centuries, never before had violence reached levels which would be seen through the early 2000s.[xxiv]

The spark which set fire to the prairie [xxv]

The violence which re-emerged in 2001 provoked a heavy security response from the Thai government, which sought to resurrect the successes of the enemy-centric focus[xxvi] of previous campaigns. The occupation of the South by Thai security forces,[xxvii] and their heavy-handed tactics, were rather a direct catalyst for the acceleration of violence in 2004.

The first of two catalytic events[xxviii] took place on 28 April 2004 when militants, in a coordinated series of attacks, attempted to overrun a string of police and military positions across Pattani, Yala and Songkhla.[xxix] Following an aggressive government response, 31 heavily armed gunmen sought refuge in the 16th century mosque at Krue Se,[xxx] a symbol of South-East Asian Islamic faith, and one of the most revered Islamic religious sites in South-East Asia.[xxxi] To end a lengthy siege, the Royal Thai Army (RTA) stormed the mosque, killing all militants therein. At the end of the day, 108 militants lay dead across the provinces, drawing the ire of the local population, who viewed the militants as martyrs and the state as butchers. Even though an independent investigation into the Krue Se incident found the RTA negligent in ‘failing to launch genuine negotiations for surrender’,[xxxii] no action was taken to hold those involved accountable. Over the following months, violence escalated significantly, with militants targeting teachers, local government officials and other ‘agents of the state’.[xxxiii] Attempting to regain control of the southern provinces, the Thai administration declared martial law and dispatched thousands of additional troops.

The second, and ‘most important’,[xxxiv] catalytic event occurred on 25 October 2004 when roughly 2,000 Malay-Muslim (mostly) unarmed youth gathered in demonstration against martial law and the perceived ‘occupation’ of the South by the Thai military, in the border village of Tak Bai. Thai soldiers and security officials severely mishandled the event, using live ammunition to disperse the crowd, resulting in several deaths.[xxxv] About 1,300 young men were detained for questioning and taken away in military trucks, bound and stacked like sardines.[xxxvi] Seventy-eight young men perished of asphyxiation while thus held in custody. The death of 85 protestors became known as the ‘Tak Bai Massacre’, drawing international attention and sparking riots across the region.[xxxvii] With this groundswell of popular support, violence soared; nearly 30 people were killed in revenge attacks within just two weeks of the incident. Attacks became more frequent, spectacular, coordinated and sophisticated,[xxxviii] resulting in the May 2005[xxxix] imposition of an emergency decree replacing martial law with enhanced powers of arrest and control[xl] for government forces, with near-total immunity[xli] from prosecution.

As violence escalated towards a mid-2007[xlii] peak, the powers granted by the emergency decree were a key motivator for continued resistance. Under the controversial law, indiscriminate arrests and detentions were common. Detainees were able to be held without charge for 28 days; regardless, many were held for 12 to 18 months. Allegations of torture and coerced confessions were persistent, but immunity under the decree has resulted in not a single officer being convicted of human rights abuses.[xliii]

Since 2007, the insurgency has continued in waves of violence, with spikes observed to coincide with national elections and other events of political significance, occasionally simmering down through periods of ineffectual negotiation.[xliv] Today the insurgency continues but is now categorised more by discriminant violence and retaliatory attacks[xlv] than large-scale unrest. Violence in the southern provinces is now accepted by the Malay population as ‘normal’,[xlvi] with one person killed a day considered ‘tolerable’.[xlvii]

The current insurgent movement has learned from the mistakes of its predecessors. Highly secretive, the organisation is almost entirely underground. What is traditionally defined as the ‘public component’,[xlviii] or political voice, of the movement is all but absent. There is no political figurehead delivering demands.[xlix] Similarly, there is rarely (if ever) any genuine claim of responsibility from the organisation following attacks.[l] While the Thai counter-insurgency efforts of the 1990s were highly successful off the back of network decapitation, the current generation’s heightened level of operational security discipline allows them to remain below the detection threshold of the Thai security forces, whose interagency rivalries prevent efficient intelligence sharing.[li]

It is unfair, however, to refer to the insurgent movement in the singular, as there are multiple organisations[lii] working towards the same goal. Groups are decentralised, independent[liii] and almost fractious, but still exercise an ‘unprecedented level of coordination’[liv] to achieve maximum effect across wide geographic areas. Comprehensive control of the disparate elements by an umbrella political apparatus is far less likely.[lv] While the previous generations of insurgent movements had difficulty engaging popular support, the current movement has been far more successful, establishing shadow social structures and forcing people out of state institutions.[lvi] In 2007, the National Reconciliation Commission estimated that about 30 per cent of the population were sympathetic and that a full 2 per cent of the population, approximately 60,000 people, could be considered active insurgents.[lvii]

Repression of the Malay ethnic identity group

In 2013, the United States Army Special Operations Command’s Assessing Revolutionary and Insurgent Strategies (ARIS) Project conducted a study into the underlying causes of political violence.[lviii] It identified eight risk factors,[lix] not prioritised and not equally weighted. Language used in the study suggests the most critical risk factors to be human factors, specifically relating to governance and to marginalisation of identity groups. The latter is described as ‘the strongest and most immediate risk factor for radicalisation’, particularly when the identity group is based on ethnicity.[lx] This assertion is particularly relevant to the Southern Thai conflict.

The southern Thailand insurgent movement is based around the alienation, discrimination and marginalisation[lxi] of the Malay-Muslim ethnic identity in the provinces of southern Thailand. As discussed above, Thai occupation and assimilation of Patani is centuries old. Regardless, the erosion of the Malay-Muslim identity is still keenly felt. The local Malays in the southern provinces believe that their unique Patani identity and traditional way of living is under threat from an illegitimate Bangkok government.[lxii] The draconian assimilation measures of the 1930s, which outlawed the use of the Malay language and the wearing of Malay dress,[lxiii] do not remain in effect, but contemporary social restrictions still drive feelings of alienation. The authority of sharia courts was officially revoked with the imposition of the Anglo-Thai treaty,[lxiv] and although there have been a number of attempts to bring Islamic law back into the Thai legal system since, sharia has remained subordinate to the national apparatus. The imposition of a national education curriculum has a multifaceted negative impact on Muslim society in the South. Not only is the curriculum secular but also it is only taught in the Thai language, which many in the Muslim community do not speak. The Ministry of Education refuses to recognise qualifications from any educational facilities which do not deliver the national curriculum, making job-seeking difficult for graduates of Islamic institutions and leading to higher rates of Malay unemployment.[lxv] These issues have led to a deep-seated feeling of second-class status.

Until the most recent Thai constitution was issued in 2017, the existence of ethnic minorities was not constitutionally recognised.[lxvi] While the 2017 constitution promotes ‘the right for different ethnic groups to live in the society according to traditional culture, custom and ways of life’, this comes with the caveat of ‘insofar as it is not contrary to public order, or good morals’.[lxvii] The Thai constitution still promotes a nationalist social identity, supported by the trinity of nation, religion and King. When the community of the Deep South identify as ethnic Patani-Malay, vice Thai, follow a different religion and cling to the ideal of an earlier Patani kingdom, the Thai nationalist agenda is particularly unsuccessful.[lxviii] Rather than being seen as paternalistic, its assimilationist policies are framed as suppression of the Malay-Muslim identity by an illegitimate colonial power, and are a driving force of the insurgent movement.[lxix]

Relative deprivation

Potentially exacerbating the feelings of marginalisation which stem from Thailand’s social policies is the relative economic deprivation present in the southern provinces. Muslim majority areas are less developed, and among the poorest provinces in Thailand.[lxx] Per capita income across the southern Muslim communities is less than half the national average[lxxi] and Yala has the third-lowest employment rate in the country.[lxxii] Explaining Why Men Rebel, Gurr’s theory of relative deprivation[lxxiii] cautions about a ‘mismatch between peoples’ level of expectation and their economic reality’.[lxxiv] However, Gurr’s theory refers to ‘discrepancies between value expectations and value capabilities’, where ‘values’ constitute ‘welfare values, power values, and interpersonal values’.[lxxv] While economic deprivation may impact on ‘welfare values’, there is less association with ‘power values’ or ‘interpersonal values’. Power values are more aligned to an individual’s, or collective’s, ability to influence their environment, either politically or in terms of security. Interpersonal values include the ability to associate or participate in social or familial identity groups. Therefore, Gurr’s relative deprivation contains wider considerations than just economic deficit, which is certainly present but not a key driver in the Southern Thai conflict.[lxxvi] Gurr’s relative deprivation theory could appropriately be applied to the deprivation of Malay-Muslim ethnic identity, social justice, religious education, and security in the southern Thai provinces leading up to 2004. Just as Maher’s “Triangle of Rebellion” in the opening chapter of this collection identified Relative Deprivation as “the heat that sustains” armed rebellion, its presence in the Southern Thai provinces is likely to be a pillar of the movement.

Competitive control

The Thai security response to the ongoing crisis has been mired in controversy. Despite tens of thousands of troops being deployed to the southern provinces, violence has continued for decades, and no significant blows have been landed against the insurgents. The Thai military’s heavy-handed tactics were a direct catalyst for the acceleration of violence following the siege at Krue Se Mosque and the hugely negligent response to protests at Tak Bai. The ‘Tak Bai Massacre’ in particular was the ‘single spark that set fire to the prairie’[lxxvii] and a certain contributor to the number of ‘accidental guerrillas’ fighting alongside the insurgents.[lxxviii] The Thaksin administration’s immediate response to the escalation of violence in 2004, ‘surging’ up to 60,000 soldiers, rangers and police to the southern provinces, was widely viewed as an occupation by a colonial power.[lxxix] Well-documented allegations of abusive behaviour, torture and extra-judicial killings by elements of the security forces, conducted with seeming impunity, destroyed any remaining perceptions of legitimacy, further alienating the population and fuelling ongoing tensions.[lxxx] In his research for the RAND Corporation, Peter Chalk quotes a commentator stating that ‘it was not so much that indigenous Malays actively supported the insurgents or shared their aspiration for an independent state; it was just that they feared and resented the police and military more’.[lxxxi]

The key concern in the Thai military’s response to the re-emergence of violence was its inability (or unwillingness) to accept the evolving nature of the insurgency.[lxxxii] The Thai government’s resurrection of an enemy-centric decapitation strategy, which was effective against opposition movements of the 1990s,[lxxxiii] failed to recognise the evolution of the contemporary insurgency, which is highly secretive, is decentralised and, in stark contrast to its predecessors, enjoys popular support. The insurgents’ short to medium term goals are simple: render the southern provinces ungovernable for the colonial Thai occupiers; goad Thai security forces into heavy-handed and repressive responses; and impose/restore Patani-Malay values on the local community.[lxxxiv] In achieving these goals they have been largely successful to date, providing an excellent example of David Kilcullen’s theory of ‘competitive control’.[lxxxv]

Kilcullen highlights that ‘in irregular conflicts, the local armed actor that a given population perceives as best able to establish a predictable, consistent, wide-spectrum normative system of control is the most likely to dominate that population’. In simple terms this means that ‘populations will respond to a predictable, ordered, normative system that tells them exactly what they need to do, and not do, in order to be safe’. To a population surrounded by conflict, this feeling of safety reigns supreme and can lead a population to support an armed group they otherwise would not, because of the order it creates.[lxxxvi] Similarly, Maher’s ‘Triangle of Rebellion’ describes control over the population as “the oxygen that sustains the flame of rebellion.”

While the militants have not had the physical numbers to control large areas of territory, they have proven far more capable at controlling the ‘mental space’ and the popular narrative than the Thai authorities. They have a clear political agenda, and their effective social programs being implemented across the South have forced people out of state-run legal, medical and educational apparatus, and have brutally suppressed any moderate Muslims who endorse conciliation.[lxxxvii] Conversely, the government security intelligence apparatus, marred by interagency tensions, jurisdictional conflicts and linguistic challenges,[lxxxviii] has proved incapable[lxxxix] of illuminating the highly secretive underground factions supporting the violence. Despite ‘control’ of the physical space, Thai security forces have remained largely on the defensive, reactive and vulnerable to attack.[xc] While the militants retain almost unrestricted freedom of manoeuvre among the population, they are able to dictate terms. To the local population, this inability to prevent attacks against Buddhists, security forces and other state figures in the South undermines any chance of success for Thai government forces in competitive control.

Counter-Insurgency vs Counter-Terrorism

Additionally, the failure to accompany the military, threat-centric line of effort with a population-centric line which addresses the underlying grievances of the population has ceded popular support to the enemy. Kilcullen’s seminal work Accidental Guerrilla[xci] notes that a counter-terrorism strategy focuses on the individual terrorist and the terrorist network. The counter-terrorism strategy assumes removing the network would remove the problem. According to Kilcullen, however, insurgency is a mass social phenomenon, where the enemy manipulates a wave of social grievances to support the movement. In this case, removing the network does not treat the cause and therefore will not remove the problem. Kilcullen suggest that true COIN is population-centric, involving competition with the insurgent for influence and control of the population at the grassroots level.[xcii] This would suggest that the Thai approach to the conflict in the South is more appropriately defined as counter-terrorism rather than counter-insurgency, potentially indicating a lack of acceptance of the political nature of the violence. The failure to adapt their strategy despite decades of experience further suggests that resolution of the situation is a low priority for the Thai military.[xciii]

Examination of Thai military spending is also indicative of the low strategic priority allocated to the southern insurgency by Thai defence leadership. Between December 2006 and January 2009, the Thai military announced over $2.5 billion in arms purchases and $9.3 billion in modernisation expenditure, the vast majority of which would have little to no value in combating an insurgency.[xciv]

Similarly, the Thaksin administration’s inept, inconsistent policies exacerbated the insurgency.[xcv] The preferred policy of the Thaksin government was to ‘confront the insurgents with directed force’[xcvi] rather than accept the political nature of the movement and consider negotiation or appeasement of social dissatisfaction. In further defiance of the movement’s political roots, at the outbreak of violence the Thai government’s policy line was to credit attacks to ‘local bandits’ or ‘drug addicts’[xcvii] in an attempt to frame the violence as a criminal, vice ideological, issue. The implementation of the Emergency Decree in 2005 has also had enduring ill-effects, providing security forces with near-total immunity and thereby suggesting tacit approval of abuses committed by the military or police. As late as 2019, Human Rights Watch commented that the Thai government ‘regularly uses military detention under the 2005 Emergency Decree in which abuses occur during interrogation with impunity’.[xcviii] While the decree allows the detention of suspects without charge for 28 days, only 19 per cent of the 7,680 people arrested under the decree by February 2011 ended up being charged by police. Of those charged, 43 per cent of the suspects who went to trial were eventually acquitted for a lack of evidence.[xcix] In October 2019, a Buddhist Chief Judge of the Yala Trial Court shot himself in public protest against coercion by senior members of the Thai judicial system to deliver capital punishment to Muslim respondents even when lacking the appropriate evidence for a conviction, let alone the death penalty.[c] Indiscriminate detention, combined with the blatant lack of consequence for human rights abuses perpetrated by security forces, and the clear prejudice present in the judicial process, has had serious consequences for perceptions among the local population and have strengthened the insurgency.[ci] Social injustice has thus become a key grievance in the movement’s ideology.[cii]

Political instability and appetite

Dissatisfaction with Thaksin’s handling of the insurgency was in fact a key trigger for the military coup of 2006.[ciii] Despite this, at the time of writing, the Emergency Decree remains in effect, and little has been done to reverse the damage of the Thaksin administration’s draconian policies, despite multiple changes of government.[civ]

While criticising the Thai government for inconsistent and ill-conceived policies on the southern conflict, it is important to note the country’s volatile political architecture over the same period of time. Between 2001 and 2020, the Thai government changed hands no fewer than eight times, twice as a result of military coups. Partisan loyalties surrounding the circumstances of Thaksin’s fall from grace caused significant political turmoil, including violence in Bangkok between 2008 and 2009 and again in 2013 and 2014.[cv] The plight of the democratic process, censorship and the imposition of new laws outlawing public gatherings of more than five people has further resulted in significant civil unrest in the capital.[cvi] In this tumultuous political environment, a home-grown, localised insurgency that does not significantly threaten the tourism industry or the national economy is somewhat tolerable.[cvii] The violence is generally contained within the southern provinces and has not (yet) drawn such a mass as to represent a cogent challenge to Bangkok. There are far more serious challenges to the government’s legitimate rule from other sources far closer to the capital, which draw attention away from the crisis in the South.

Significantly, for six of the recent insurgency’s 17 years, the state of Thailand was governed by a conservative military junta. The military-led government was far more defensive of the constitution’s ‘indivisible state’ and therefore far less willing to accommodate negotiations which included discussion of autonomy or secession. Following the 2019 general elections, previous military chief General Prayuth Chan-ocha remained in power as Prime Minister, reducing the likelihood of a change in this policy position. Of note, pro-democracy protests against Chan-ocha’s military-backed government[cviii] have continued well into 2020,[cix] further highlighting that the insurgency is not likely to emerge as the primary challenger to the legitimacy of the Thai government any time soon. In such a political climate, the threat posed by the southern opposition movement is apparently of peripheral concern.

Key lessons & Conclusion

The lack of progress towards a resolution after such a protracted period of conflict amounts to a failure by the Thai government and its security forces to adequately address the instability in the southern Provinces, providing valuable lessons in what not to do to observers of irregular warfare theory.

Firstly, the failure of successive Thai administrations to recognise and accept the political nature of the violence, whether from ignorance or denial, resulted in both an inability to address the root cause of unrest and the application of an inappropriate military strategy to counter the opposition movement. When referring to the southern militants, terms such as ‘terrorists’, ‘criminals’ and ‘jihadists’ continue to creep into the official Thai discourse. More than simply semantics, the strategic impact of such nomenclature is policy misdirection in the continuing pursuit of a counter-terrorism strategy. As outlined above, Kilcullen’s The Accidental Guerrilla[cx] articulates that a counter-terrorism strategy focuses on defeating the threat network (enemy-centric), whereas a counter-insurgency strategy focuses on defeating the network’s ability to leverage popular disaffection (population-centric).[cxi] By labelling the movement as terrorist or criminal, the Thai authorities have ignored or overlooked their responsibilities to address the root causes of disaffection among the Malay population in the southern provinces. When the most serious risk factors for political violence, as identified in the ARIS study,[cxii] form the basis of the underlying grievances which support the opposition movement, and the ethnic tensions are deeply ingrained by centuries of assimilationist policies, dedicated effort and careful policy treatments are going to be required. In his comprehensive study of the insurgency, Conspiracy of Silence,[cxiii] Zachary Abuza lists the policy reforms that could make a real difference as issues of security force immunity, legal reforms and the protection of defendant rights, and serious discussions about political autonomy,[cxiv] but notes inappropriate political influence of the military and interagency ‘turf wars’ as having significant negative effects on the development of appropriate policy solutions.[cxv]

Secondly, the Thai security apparatus demonstrates a crippling lack of flexibility in resurrecting an outdated enemy-centric, counter-leadership strategy and failing to adapt to the evolution of the threat group, despite decades of conflict experience. Reflecting on their severe losses in the 1990s, opposition groups maintain primacy of operational security, with the vast majority of the organisation existing below the Thai security detection threshold. The inability to overcome interagency rivalries to facilitate effective intelligence sharing, and therefore understanding of threat networks, denies Thai security forces the ability to detect, locate and curtail the activities of the underground elements which support the insurgency. Thus, the Thai military posture has been largely static, defensive and reactive to the initiative and freedom of action enjoyed by the threat actors.[cxvi]

This systemic inflexibility has also resulted in the inexcusable failure to both recognise and rectify some major missteps in the campaign thus far. The catalytic events at Krue Se and Tak Bai were made so by the excessive aggression of Thai military personnel. While these events have been independently investigated[cxvii] and official apologies have been delivered, no individuals have been held accountable and therefore no justice has been provided to those affected.[cxviii] Widespread concern about and condemnation of the 2005 Emergency Decree has fallen on deaf ears, providing the military seemingly enduring approval to directly exacerbate perceptions of social injustice through continuing impunity to human rights abuses.[cxix] Abuza noted, from interviews with multiple Muslims in the South, that ‘until the issue of social justice is tackled, the insurgency cannot be quelled.[cxx] The Southern Provinces remain saturated by Thai military presence, leaving no opportunity for the public perceptions of a colonial occupation to abate. Some commentators have even started to refer to Southern Thailand as ‘a military colony’.[cxxi] The Thai military’s tunnel vision on treating the symptoms of the insurgency, rather than the underlying causes of popular discontent, has provided the opposition movement the edge in competitive control.

Finally, the violence in the southern provinces continues as a result of the successive Thai governments and military leadership not being committed to defeating a low-level insurgency which is not seen as a credible threat to Bangkok and at times provides justification for increased defence budgets .[cxxii] Political stability has been anathema to Bangkok over the last few decades, with military coups, violent protests and multiple impeachments presenting far more prominent dilemmas to sitting administrations. While the insurgency remains contained to the South, it is unlikely to take primacy of attention over existential threats in the streets of the capital.[cxxiii] Although negotiations have occurred on a couple of occasions,[cxxiv] neither party has demonstrated genuine investment in the process or commitment to a peaceful outcome. The movement’s secessionist objectives, or demands for autonomy, meet strong constitutional resistance from conservative interlocutors in the military hierarchy, as well as senior members of the Thai cabinet. The human risk factors[cxxv] which drive popular dissatisfaction have been laid down over centuries of assimilationist policies; genuine, deliberate political investment will be required to reverse these effects, regardless of military strategy. Despite multiple successive Thai leaders pledging to fix the ‘southern problem’, the will to commit such an investment is clearly lacking.

In light of these three clear failings, which have endured over 17 years of continuous violence and conflict, it is clear that a peaceful solution is not on the near horizon. Srisimpob Jitpiromsri and Duncan McCargo noted in 2020 that ‘since the inept interventions of the Thai state are prime components of the ongoing conflict, bringing peace to the South must involve ways for Bangkok to do less, not more’. [cxxvi] This would require both a political and a strategic adaptability that the Thai government has been neither able nor willing to demonstrate in the conflict’s history.

This article is one essay from the Irregular Warfare Essay Collection.